The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)

At that point, Olga took heed and tried to take the ring off but – no go! She twirled, and pulled, and spat at the darn thing to no avail, the ring snapped real tight on. The date turned into a dungeon torture session until she somehow managed to force it over her finger joint.

When, at last, I shoved the cursed ring into my hip-pocket, we were not fit for kisses and stuff with Olga's finger hurt and swollen and me feeling sorry for her. So I locked the booth and we left…

Now, Kolyan at that same period was picking up steam in the ticket office together with the Plant Park watchman, and he observed who it was coming down from above. And what could he possibly have thought, if from the booth portholes, for some half-hour the female moans were floating over the entire summer cinema?

"Oh, my! Mmmm! Ouu! Ay!"

That’s why, he kinda thought: where, in such a small…well.. thing…could it…sort of…be sitting? In a word, he respected me as a bro hero, only from another branch.

And for all those reasons, coming on a visit to the sheet-iron trailer and having sat in heated expectation thru the ongoing stupid debates of the present booby jerks on that it was high time to kick the ass of the Peace Square hippies who lately had become way too hippy, and when at last they’d free the premises of their presence happy with their being such cool goons, we still had to wait until Kolyan would finish his endless explanation as to where…well…to…kinda put…the key…well…of…sort of…the trailer…

The warmest feelings were left by the long sheepskin coat of Aunt Nina in which Olga once ventured from the khutta wicket. We descended into the snow-filled Grove with the patches of smooth hard ice of the frozen Swamp and it was good, but, as always, not enough…

~ ~ ~

At Plant, the term of our apprentice training expired and we began to get the payment of 70 rubles a month – almost as much as other locksmiths. Now, cutting the iron with a chisel, we no longer hammer-squashed our fingers and we (the hairy yobbos) were even trusted with the manufacture of an experimental product from scratch… It's interesting.

We scrutinized the intangible speculative thought turned into the visual lines of blue-prints specked with countless figures to indicate dimension. Observing those figures, we asked the gas cutter to cut the necessary pieces out from 20 mm-thick sheet iron, asked the marker to delineate the contours, asked the planer to scratch odd metal off to the markings, asked the welder to weld this one to that, and that to another…

Why so many requests? Well, because everyone's busy, sort of… Sometimes from the request to its execution, it took weeks of waiting, or go and ask once again…

And—lo!—the skeleton of the product-in-progress on the deck-rack outta the Repair Shop Floor grew with the added assemblage parts, began to gradually acquire engaging looks. Overseer ceased to call us "hairy yobbos" at every turn, and the Experimental Unit locksmiths drop the stale joke about the launch date of our "Lunokhod-2", aka Lunar Rover.

At that point Manager of the Experimental Unit ordered to deliver the already thoroughly-smeared cardboard folder with the multitude of blue-prints to Yasha and Mykola-the-old letting the more skilled workforce finalize the disembodied technical idea in weighty tangibility… It hurts.

The following product was simply ruined by us… Using lots of material, we assembled the massive stand “Glory to Labor!” on the deck-rack and called Borya Sakoon to assess the accomplished work before erecting it on the square in front of the Main Check-Entrance. The overseer looked thru the blueprints and said something was wrong though he couldn’t put the finger on it.

Engineer-Technologist climbed down from the Shop Floor Management Office above the locker room and joined Borya’s negative appraisal – yes, something was certainly amiss, not quite the thing. However, neither separately nor together, they could tell exactly what’s not right, even after checking the dimensions of the manufactured monument with a tape measure.

The author of the ill-starred project was called from the Design Bureau by the Plant Management. And it took a while even for him to discover the reason. We faithfully preserved all the subtleties of his idea and executed it in metal without any deviations except for producing the mirrored reflection of the blueprints. The product was cut to pieces and the square remained without the prospective architectural beautification…

After the New Year, a special team was sent from the Experimental Unit to the construction site of a feed mill in the village of Semyanovka. The team comprised three locksmiths: Mykola-the-young, Vasya, and me, under command of Borya Sakoon, our Overseer.

On the first morning, as we started off to Semyanovka under the tarp top over the truck bed, there was dreadful ice on the roads. The truck driver drove very slowly not to slide and follow the suite of those vehicles whose drivers had lost control on the ice, and they loomed now, here and there, with their wheels up in the dense fog wrapping the roadside. And we cautiously puttered on thru eerie stillness and flowing fog waves that muffled the sound of the truck engine. Some panorama of the concluding stage in the Stalingrad Battle for you…

The feed mill was a gray building of three sections, at a half-kilometer off the village, surrounded from all the sides by a chilly silent field of weather-beaten snow.

The boiler room did not work, we had to bore the wall yet, with breakers, to lay pipes thru. Frosty iron sides of numb bunkers and mute conveyor-belts filled the space in the other half-dark section.

For two weeks we went there to knock steel against steel at walloping the walls and rigging the conveyor belts, or to doze over the red-hot electrical spiral in the boiler room with its frost-coated walls.

At one of such soft snoozes, a sharp awl tip pierced my brain. Starting up from pain to the jubilant guffaw from Vasya's happy snout, I noticed a piece of smoldering cotton dropped on the floor, whose bitter smoke had penetrated thru my nostrils to give the unbearable sensation… Overseer and Mykola also laughed, but not as gleefully as Vasya, that stupid dickhead or, to put it limpidly, the fucking 30-year-old miscarriage. No wonder, my Uncle Vadya was never tired to recite his favorite chant, “Heroes are what Homeland needs, yet Cunt keeps turning out morons…”

One day Mykola brought raw potatoes from a solitary clamp in the field and we undertook baking them just to have some pastime. Borya sent me to collect the pieces of crushed boards remaining on the site after they finished construction works. Mykola and Vasya fetched a couple armfuls of some straw to the unfinished weigh-bridge section for kindling the bonfire with the firewood fetched by me.

The gate to the section, with one of its wings removed from the hinges, could not ward off the wind which kept breaking in and swerved the smoke whichever way it fancied. We stood around the fire in the chilly gusts that tore inside from the white field under the gray sky, when Overseer remarked, "In four years I will retire but this here latata would not get ready yet." He threw a "Prima" stub into the fire and went into the section’s corner to blind the walls with a welding electrode set a-crackling.

What a beautiful word "latata", I have never heard anyone calling potatoes that way… Now, Borya started playing with the electric welding, Vasya went over to hold the pipe pieces for him to weld up and by the dismal fire there remained only Mykola and I with our shoulders rolled up, noses wrinkled, eyes at a squint from the smart smoke. Some boring party…

Then, grabbing the piece of chalk which we brought along with us to mark the lengths of pipe when cutting it up, I started drawing on the gate wing leaned against its shut counterpart. I did it bit by bit and tried to do my level best, there was plenty of time before the truck would come to take us home.

Perhaps, that was the most successful drawing in my entire life, almost of natural dimensions, with thorough attention to the details. Nu, of course… Hips, yummy breasts, long hair streaming over the shoulders to fall behind the back, the captivating triangle and tempting call "Come! Fuck me!" in the look of her eyes from under partly dropped eyelids. Wow! Nothing to add to nor remove from.

However, the piece of chalk had not been finished off yet. So, I used it for block letters next to the nude beauty. "BORYA, I AM WAITING FOR YOU!."

Then I went to the fire because the wind had thoroughly chilled the feet of the artist absorbed in his creative efforts. Mykola stood there too and giggled gazing at the seductive creature.

At that moment, Borya Sakoon took his face out the black box of his welder mask and traced Mykola's stare back to the gate wing. No Stanislavsky system would ever reproduce the facial expression acquired by Borya's mug a moment later. "Who?!."

Mykola and I stood by the fire pretending naive ignorance of reasons for the emotional outburst which shattered the Overseer’s soul.

As for Vasya, squatted next to Overseer to hold the workpiece pipe with both hands, his stare was quite impartially dropped down but, at the same time, Vasya’s piggy snout turned into a stubby index finger and pointed at me like the compass needle who knows where North is.

"Bitch!." The innate instinct for self-preservation did its job, and I sprinted to the conveyors' section ahead of the pipe-length tinkling along the cemented floor after me.

Why, of so too many foul words in Borya's lexicon, did he give preference to "bitch!"? To uphold the tradition of thieves-in-law? Good luck he'd never been trained at gorodki game…

I came back ten minutes later. The word "BORYA" was slavishly effaced from the gate wing with Vasya’s work mitt. The rest was left as is. The hand of vandals dared not destroy the masterpiece…

~ ~ ~

We played in the Mirror Hall, aka Ballet Studio Gym. Lekha sat at the Yonika, Skully – behind his "kitchen", Chuba, in a dormant stupor, glued his vacant gaze at nothing in the middle of the dimly lit Hall while picking sluggishly the strings of his bass guitar.

It was a slow-tempo number, the "white dance" for girls to pick their partners. Vladya's girlfriend Raya had invited and led him off into the mass of dancers to have hugs in the slow floating waves of light specks from the mirror splinters in the ball spinning overheads.

In the right corner of the small stage, leaning my behind against the lowered fallboard of the upright piano, I strummed the chords of the rhythm-guitar part. Behind the piano, Olga stood with her arms folded over its top board and bored she was. "Kiss me," demanded she from behind the piano.

I turned my head to the left and, over my shoulder and the black upright thing between us, merged into a long kiss with her warm soft lips. My fingers knew without me when to go to the next chord…

With the public kiss over, I modestly turned my face down to my guitar to regain the normal breathing and heard the shocked exclamation from Olga, "Oy! Mother!"

Her stifled cry signaled that the end of Heorot was at the gate… Midst the gooey hugs and swoony swaying of the dancers, like a rigid rock stood and watched her her mother who had unexpectedly arrived from the Crimea to take Olga back to Theodosia down there…

And from another end of our boundless, vast Homeland, from another port city in another sea, The Spitzbergen band arrived in Konotop from the Murmansk city to start playing dances at Loony, as arranged with Loony’s Director, Bohmstein.

We were undone by The Spitzes in a fortnight. Two weeks later, the Mirror Hall at Club was empty because the dancing crowd spurted to the dances in Loony, to the concert hall on the second floor, which used to be the listing for CJR competitive battles, and now, freed of all the audience seats, was turned into a parquet ballroom.

However, not the parquet became the decisive point. The restaurant band from Murmansk, made up of 4 musicians of 20-to-25 years old, came with the Western instruments and rock-group equipment available in port cities, including the organ of the "Roland" brand, and (most importantly) they sang. Moreover, they sang into professional microphones producing the echo effect. "One!.. un!.. un! Two!.. oo!.. oo!"

The Orpheuses with their homemade stuff went kaput. Yes, there still remained concerts in Club, "playing trash" but the dances just faded out…

Olga's both mother and unregistered stepfather left Konotop taking along her most solemn oath of coming back to Theodosia in two weeks, yet The Spitzes got firmly anchored in the city…

End February, I saw Olga off in a train leaving from Platform 4. She boarded the last car, the conductor locked the thick iron door and went inside. When the starting jerk pulled the car, Olga waved to me thru the door glass.

Grabbing the handrails by the sides of the locked door I jumped onto the steps under it. The train was quickly gaining speed, she freaked out and frantically cried behind the glass I could not hear what, as if I did not know what I was doing. I jumped off at the very end of the platform, because farther on you could indeed break a leg or two against the rails, and the crossties half-buried in the gravel…

In March I sent her a letter. It was very romantic stuff of how above the locksmith vise at my workplace I was seeing the heavenly features of her dear face.